problem getting Premier Elements to recognize CamStudio output

First of all; congratulations on a great product. I have been using CamStudio for a couple of months and have completed a number of videos (many are 30 minutes, two are 50 minutes long) and uploaded them to Vimeo. They look absolutely fabulous in full screen 1080p.

Recently, I discovered that I needed to do some minor editing to a couple of the videos. In one case I needed to remove 20 seconds of dead air, in the other, I need to insert an additional 30-40 seconds of video in the middle of an existing clip.

Since I am new to video, but extremely comfortable with Adobe products from my photography work, I purchased Adobe Premier Elements (their basic video editor) since my edits seemed to be pretty basic.

Imagine my surprise when Premier Elements would not open the AVI file frm CamStudio. I found a video/audio converter (Brorsoft) that I am testing and it does a fine job of converting the video to a format that PE can read.

It would make life easier for me if my output file frm Cam Studio could be read directly by Premier Elements. I am currently using the XVID MPEG-4 codec that you recommended.

The documentation on Premier Elements indicates that it will accept an .avi file as input!

Comments

Premier and Vegas typically can’t open any type of 264 in an AVI wrapper. Seth B offered this solution in a thread some time ago:

“”“Vegas can't decode x264 in an AVI wrapper. But, it does just fine with x264 in an MP4 wrapper.

If you go into the x264vfw configuration, specify Output | Output Mode | File. I set VFW FourCC at x264, but this may not be needed outside of AVI.

Then, in the Output section, specify a path and filename.mp4.

Capture with your favorite settings. When you stop the recording, CamStudio will prompt for an AVI filename. This file is created, but isn't playable. Look for your mp4; it worked well for me in Vegas Pro 10. Note that any more caps are likely to overwrite your first cap - rename it, or spec a new filename.”“”“

I was skeptical, but gave it a try and found that it does seem to work. It really shouldn’t, but it does. Use the 264 codec UI, rather than the MPEG-4.

Thanks again. Almost there. The "trick" above worked great. The only problem was that I did not get any audio!!! When the video plays back in Windows Media Player, I can hear the sound but there is no video.

I can now import the video into Premier Elements and it sees the video fine, but there is no audio track!

I’ve now gone through the entire process and have come up with results similar to yours. I get an MP4 file with no audio and an AVI file with audio but no picture. There’s no easy way to merge these two, since editors won’t generally accept movie files as primary audio tracks. So, if anyone figured out how to get this process to work in one step back when the quoted thread was active, it would be great if they could fill in the blanks here.

After reading all of the potential solutions for the 264/AVI problem with Vegas and Premier, I’m reaching the point of thinking that there isn’t a good one. If one has to essentially run a video through an editor to convert it for use in another editor, maybe that second editor isn’t worth the bother of using at all.

BTW I use Avidemux 2.5.4 for converting my Cam h264/AVI files and have never had a problem. I gave up on Premier quite a while back and didn’t even bother to bring it onto my new computer.